Social Motives and the Organization of Production: Experimental Evidence from Open Source Software

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Résumé

The paper analyzes the behaviour of 1,200 open source software (OSS) developers and uses the behaviour of the OSS developers in experimental trust, dictator, and public games to predict and explain the behavior of OSS developers in software projects. The authors find that those developers with higher social motivation tend to participate in fewer projects, but cooperate more intensively. By highlighting the role of social motivation and self-selection of like-minded types into project teams, the paper contributes to the important question of how organizations that are lacking formal structure and hierarchies can solve problems of free-riding of their members.